'Life of Pi' trailer looks (too) dreamy

Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi was published in 2003, and it became a bestseller and book club phenomenon shortly after. The story of a boy's survival on a life raft after a shipwreck had a haunting and inspiring narrative that resonated with readers. Unlike, say, The Hunger Games, I have always been doubtful that the book would make a good movie. The storyteller is an unreliable narrator. What he sees is not always reality, and audiences tend to chafe at any plotlines that end with the reveal "it was all a dream." That's a rough approximation of the ending of the book, which relies heavily on a final Sixth Sense-like twist that changes the entire 300 pages before it. The trailer for director Ang Lee's feature adaptation, which is set for a prime Thanksgiving release, just hit the Internet. The sets look like surreal compositions created on a nearby soundstage, a little too dreamy for my taste.

The scenes with the lifeboat marooned in glassy, motionless water feel the most artificial to me. I was a little reminded of director Peter Jackson's adaptation of another bestseller, The Lovely Bones. That drama was also told through the lens of a unique narrator, a murdered child. The ephemeral dreaminess of her narrative wasn't captured successfully on film. To compensate, there were scenes set in heaven that were there more for purposes of tone, not narrative, and those were the biggest red flags for me.

 

 

I certainly hope I'll be proved wrong, but I can think of very few movies that successfully show a narrator's altered reality and then follow it up with another version of reality. Even in short dream sequences, audiences often feel cheated. That explains why Oliver Stone's Savages (which has multiple endings) got a terrible C+ rating in exit polls. Or why horror movies sometimes follow up the "it was all a dream" section with another one that reveals, in fact, the monsters or whatever is plaguing the victim are in fact real. "People with distorted perspective" movies like Taxi Driver and The Shining have sometimes worked, and the dream concept is also popular in sci-fi movies like The Matrix and Inception (which at least gave a reason for their altered realities). With its stunning visual images and literary roots, Life of Pi is clearly Oscar bait. But will critics and audiences bite?

New life for 'Pi' with Ang Lee

By Sarah Sluis

Ang Lee, director of action and romance, will take a crack at developing Life of Pi, a book acquired back in its bestseller days and subsequently developed into a couple of screenplays. Fox 2000 has

never gotten the project off the ground. The property is a challenge: it involves a Sixth Sense-type realignment in the last pages of the book, but doesn't commit to the change, leaving the ending open in a way that Hollywood would usually close.

Not surprisingly, M. Night Shyamalan himself has written a screenplay for the work, along with Dean Georgaris (The Manchurian Candidate, What Happens in Vegas). Whether the project moves beyond talks will probably depend on the director's take on the work (and what to do with that ending). Fox 2000, the rights holder, is currently looking for another writer to make a third go-around on the screenplay, tailoring it to Lee's vision.

The project poses an additional challenge beyond its twisty ending: animals. Most of the book takes place on a lifeboat (a third problem), where a boy is stranded with a zebra, hyena, orangutan, and tiger. Would Lee use real ones, or CGI creations? The boy also communicates with the animals--will they speak or will it be an internal thought?

There are certainly precedents for these types of dilemmas. Who can forget the monologues Tom Hanks conducted with a volleyball in Cast Away? Alfred Hitchcock set a whole movie on a lifeboat (and included a cameo of himself via a newspaper) in 1944's Lifeboat. There's also the countless dog, cat, and horse movies where you can sense the bond not only between the animals but also between the owner and the animal.

The most intriguing, and not immediately cinematic, part of Yann Martel's book is that all of our information comes from the boy, but he himself is not necessarily a reliable witness (thus the Sixth Sense comparison--although there we have the young boy present to give us clues that Bruce Willis is not as he seems). Just as I am curious to see the equally challenging adaptation of The Road this spring, I would love to see what Ang Lee could do with as introspective, animal-oriented a book as Life of Pi.